Agreement rarely involves love, and love does not necessarily
entail agreement. Most of my books are not about Nietzsche, and
over the years I have developed my own views on many of the
problems with which Nietzsche dealt. …Whoever digs for gold must clear away a lot of rubbish.
(—Walter Kaufman, in Preface to Third Edition, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 1968)
Reading Nietzsche in
morning requires Lao-Tzu’s
earlier balance
Supreme Court says federal judges trump legislative branch in determining personal rights.
Mitch McConnell is overheard wondering: Who knew my stopping Obama federal appointees and flooding Trump era appointees plus two Justices would yield such benefit?
Mirabile dictu!
Those final interviews with Christopher Hitchens before his death are compelling. His formidable articulate opinions against religion are worth hearing.
The question of God, the whys and wherefores of divine life, and the ways religions either narrow or expand human freedom — these are hotly debated and significant matters.
“When the unexpected happens it goes a long distance.” (Kerry Sanders, nbc news, from site of Surfside condominium collapse in Florida, 25june21)
Such occurrences are unnerving and full of sorrow for families and friends.
So, too, in a collateral sense, God and religion.
And, yet, so many find joy and solace in God and religion.
It’s a day to day consideration.
I’m grateful to both Christopher Hitchens and Martin Heidegger, Richard Rohr and Abraham Joshua Heschel.
For those who deeply question and those who dare to move through faith.
They are good companions through both proximate intimacy and unexpected long distances.
People worry they do not grasp christianity, or, perhaps, that they've dismissed it for its failures.
Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed.
- 1 Peter 1:13
Perhaps fretting is premature.
Christianity has not yet been revealed.
Hence, there is nothing yet to be grasped. There is nothing yet to be dismissed.
Jesus, the man of history, you might say, is the beginning of the transformation of the has-been and the coming-to-be of humanity on the way to something we are not yet certain what.
We are, as Jesus is, in process -- a continual and perennial process toward a coming-to-be as yet unsuspected and perhaps inconceivable.
The movement of it all invites an ongoing realization that the movement itself is the urge and the vital energy of one thing becoming another becoming the thing-itself only to continue on into realms of unimaginable creative processes of coming-to-be.
There are, yes, those who try to nail time to clouds. Those who try to box up and sell pieces of the process as knickknacks trademarked and patented for proprietary consumption. These are entrepreneurs of contained and controlled sect and lore.
The truth, I submit, is something else.
So the question becomes: What is being revealed in its becoming itself?
Try this on as a spiritual inquiry!
I note the ship sinks
Foot by foot water streams in —
Face it, you can’t swim
The dead are only dead to those who believe in death.
To the rest of us the dead are just on the other side of disappearance.
Where is that?
In the middle of all action, that still point where everything revolves around unseen unheard origin.
Ever with us.
As potential emergence.
Hidden under perception, just before manifestation, evanescent surmise.
Not yet born, just after death, in midst if life.
Some dialogues, like this one between Thomas á Becket and King Henry IV, never disappear from mind:
B: You have a different task to do.
You have to steer the ship.
H: And you - what do you have to do?
B: To resist you with all my might
when you steer against the Lord God.
H: What do you expect of me then?
Are you hoping I'll weaken?
B: No.
I'm afraid we must only do,
absurdly,
what it has been given to us to do
right to the end.
(--from filmscript of Becket, 1964, from play Becket; ou, l'honneur de Dieu, [Becket; or, The Honor of God], 1959, by Jean Anouih)
There!
Practice your lines.
Continue the play.
How do you know your life is meaningful?
In fact, there are even less complex approaches to meaningfulness. In Philosophy Now, Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London in the UK, provides an extremely simple answer: “The meaning of life is not being dead.”
While that may sound coy, many philosophers offer similar responses, although few as pithy. Philosopher Richard Taylor proposes that efforts and accomplishments aren’t what make life matter, writing in the 1970 book Good and Evil, “the day was sufficient to itself, and so was the life.” In other words, because we live, life matters.
It can be disconcerting, perhaps, to have such an easy answer. And detractors might argue that nothing can matter, given the immensity of the universe and the brevity of our lives. But this assumes our purpose is fixed, rigid and assigned externally, and not flexible or a product of the mind.
(--from, The Secret to a Meaningful life is simpler than you think, Quartz, by
June 24, 2018)
- Ephrat Livni,
Mind, like spirit, comes and goes as it pleases when and where it pleases.
For now, I'm good with that.